18 Comments
Oct 19, 2022Liked by Esther Cohen

We need to see a photo!!

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Oct 19, 2022Liked by Esther Cohen

This is a very charming story. I love imagining this coat.

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Oct 19, 2022Liked by Esther Cohen

That would make me love that special coat even more 😍

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L&PM Pocket collection

“To be alone, to live inwardly for oneself, was for me a need as imperative as contact and human warmth. Both very strong and passionate needs, but separate and subject to change and alternation, and that is precisely what infidelity and inconstancy look like.”

Novelist, essayist and psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was above all a free spirit. At twenty, she begins a philosophical friendship with Nietzsche and plays with the fire of their love. At thirty, companion of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, she guides him on the path of creation and flees from his passion. At forty, she is welcomed by Freud as his most brilliant disciple. A woman among men, she dreams of a “world of brothers”, of marriage without sexuality, of motherhood without procreation, of the unconscious without destructive instincts. Philosophy, poetry and psychoanalysis are the instruments of the only affirmation that interests this provocative woman: the indissoluble bond of the individual with life as a whole.

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L&PM Pocket collection

“To be alone, to live inwardly for oneself, was for me a need as imperative as contact and human warmth. Both very strong and passionate needs, but separate and subject to change and alternation, and that is precisely what infidelity and inconstancy look like.”

lou andreas salome

Novelist, essayist and psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was above all a free spirit. At twenty, she begins a philosophical friendship with Nietzsche and plays with the fire of their love. At thirty, companion of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, she guides him on the path of creation and flees from his passion. At forty, she is welcomed by Freud as his most brilliant disciple. A woman among men, she dreams of a “world of brothers”, of marriage without sexuality, of motherhood without procreation, of the unconscious without destructive instincts. Philosophy, poetry and psychoanalysis are the instruments of the only affirmation that interests this provocative woman: the indissoluble bond of the individual with life as a whole.

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Having a Coke with You

Frank O’Hara - 1926-1966

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

From The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara by Frank O'Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O'Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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author

I love this poem

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Oct 19, 2022Liked by Esther Cohen

These things happen! My Miracle Coat appeared online: blue, purple, green Harris Tweed, woven leather buttons, lining like new. $40, fits like made to measure. Indestructible, so someone else will enjoy it.

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Wonderful story. Did your $100 check bounce?

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author

miraculous but NO

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Oct 19, 2022Liked by Esther Cohen

Wonderful!

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That must have been some well-made garment to still be your winter coat 25 years later! And 25 years ago, we were still carrying around a checkbook and yielding to our best impulses.

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author

I have many many winter coats!!!

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That's it's own piece!!!

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Oct 19, 2022Liked by Esther Cohen

And beautifully read, Esther!

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Orides Fontela

"He speaks"

All

it will be difficult to say:

the real word

it's never smooth.

Everything will be hard:

merciless light

excessive experience

too much awareness of being.

everything will be

able to hurt. It will be.

aggressively real.

So real it tears us apart.

There's no mercy in the signs

and not in love: being

is excessively lucid

and the word is dense and hurts us.

(Every word is cruelty)

Orides de Lourdes Teixeira Fontela was born in São João da Boa Vista, in the interior of São Paulo, on April 21, 1940. He began writing poems at the age of seven. As she herself said, her family "had no cultural base, my father was an illiterate worker, so the culture I picked up was based on high school, normal school and reading". At the age of 27, she left her hometown and came to live in São Paulo, with two dreams in her mind: to enter USP and publish a book. She did both: she studied Philosophy and published her first book, Transposition, with the help of professor Davi Arrigucci Jr., her countryman. After graduating, she was a primary school teacher and librarian in state schools. She also published Helianto (1973), Alba (1983), Rosacea (1986), Trevo 1969-1988 (1988) and Teia (1996). With Alba, she received the Jabuti Poetry Prize in 1983; and with Teia, she received the award from the São Paulo Association of Art Critics, in 1996. Always having financial difficulties, at the end of her life, she ended up being evicted from her apartment in the center of the city and went to live with her friend Gerda at the Student House, an old building on Avenida São João. She was an irritable person and often got into trouble, fighting with her best friends. She died in Campos de Jordão, aged 58, on November 4, 1998, of cardiopulmonary failure, at Fundação Sanatório São Paulo.

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Love – because it is an essential word

start this song and all envelop it.

Love guide my verse, and as you guide it,

gather soul and desire, member and vulva.

Who will dare to say that he is only soul?

Who doesn't feel the soul expand in the body

until it blooms in pure scream

of orgasm, in an instant of infinity?

The body in another body intertwined,

fused, dissolved, back to origin

of beings, which Plato saw completed:

is one, perfect in two; they are two in one.

Integration in bed or already in the cosmos?

Where does the fourth end and reach the stars?

What strength in our flanks carries us

to that extreme, ethereal, eternal region?

To the delicious touch of the clitoris,

everything is already transformed, in a flash.

In a tiny point of this body,

the source, the fire, the honey were concentrated.

Go penetration breaking clouds

and piercing suns so blazing

that no human eye could bear them,

but, pierced by light, coitus follows.

And it goes on and spreads with such luck

that, beyond us, beyond life itself,

as an active abstraction that becomes flesh,

the idea of ​​enjoying is enjoying.

And in a suffering of jouissance between words,

less than that, sounds, gasps, woe,

a single spasm in us reaches the climax:

that's when love dies of love, divine.

How many times have we died in each other,

in the damp underground of the vagina,

in this death softer than sleep:

the pause of the senses, satisfied.

Then peace sets in. the peace of the gods,

stretched out on the bed, like statues

dressed in sweat, thanking

what to a god adds earthly love.

– Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in “The natural love”. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1992.

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